The international list for this year’s James Tait Black Prizes features authors with links to America, Denmark, Finland and Oman with stories transporting readers to America, England, Kosovo and Renaissance Portugal.
Fiction contenders
Contenders for this year’s fiction prize include a meditation on an Omani student’s experiences building a life for herself in Britain, and a reimagining of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield set in the Appalachian Mountains of the United States.
Other nominated titles are a story of the passion and terror of the love affair between two young men in the shadow of war in Kosovo, and a debut novel revisiting the lives of trailblazing feminists from the 19th and 20th centuries who helped shape the modern world.
The awards – presented by the University of Edinburgh since 1919 – are the only major British book prizes judged by literature scholars and students.
Luminous collection
This year the judges described the shortlist as a luminous collection of books by an exciting mix of award-winning writers and emerging talent.
The four novels shortlisted for the £10,000 fiction prize are: Bitter Orange Tree by Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth (Scribner, Simon & Schuster); Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber & Faber); Bolla by Pajtim Statovci, translated from Finnish by David Hackston (Faber & Faber); and After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz (Galley Beggar Press).
Quality Biography
The shortlist for the £10,000 biography prize includes the story of a woman’s journey from a sheltered childhood in Oklahoma to an adulthood of learning and love affairs, and a chronicle of a year-long coastal trek from the northernmost tip of Denmark to Holland.
Also in the running are a memoir about the writer’s apprenticeship with authors Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein and his introduction to the New York literary scene, and an exhilarating account of two early modern Portuguese travellers and their competing views of the world.
The four biographies shortlisted for the £10,000 prize are: Homesick by Jennifer Croft (Charco Press); A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors, translated from Danish by Caroline Waight (Pushkin Press); Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan by Darryl Pinckney (Riverrun); and A History of Water: Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History by Edward Wilson-Lee (William Collins).
The shortlists will be reread, annotated, and discussed by students and scholars to decide the winners of both the prizes, which will be announced by the University on Wednesday 26 July.
The shortlist and winners will also be discussed as part of a James Tait Black sponsored event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August, which is taking place at the University’s Edinburgh College of Art.